“Late? What mattered an hour on the dial when I wanted you so much?”
And she flushed and hesitated, remembering she had not gone back at that unseemingly hour lest he should misunderstand her; men were so cold in their judgments. Looking at him now she was ashamed of that doubt of him.
“Was it in truth the lateness of the hour, or—or because of what Barry said to you on the stair? I opened the attic door and saw you, and I knew he was talking of his love. My God, how I envied him! Was it for that you stayed away from me?”
She turned her head aside with a gesture that hurt him like a knife-thrust. Then the question that had burnt in his thoughts, and filled his heart with cankering jealousy all these weeks, came out:—
“Joscelyn, did you love him? Tell me the truth in mercy.”
Slowly her eyes came back to him, soft and blue, and kindled with a flame he had never seen before. He rose on his elbow to meet the answer, eager yet fearful; but before she could speak, Betty opened the door.
“Eustace and I are coming to sit with you awhile, Richard, for you two must be better acquainted,” she said to him; and with the blindness that is a part of love, neither she nor Eustace saw that their coming was unwelcome. Before they left, Joscelyn had slipped away, carrying his question and its answer in her heart. But before she went to bed, she opened the box where she kept her treasures, and kneeling in front of her fire, laid upon the glowing embers the scarlet sash of an officer in the king’s service.
“I have no right to keep you any longer,” she whispered, as the silk cracked and crinkled, and passed away in a smoke-fringed flame; “no right, for now I know, I know!”
The quiet of the town was now frequently broken; for as February drew to a close, some of the soldiers began to straggle home, some on furlough, some on dismissal. Billy Bryce, hungry for the toothsome things in his mother’s pantry and impatient for a sight of the yellow curls that sunned themselves on Janet’s head, came first. But ten minutes spent in that young woman’s company so dampened his spirits, that for days his mother’s utmost efforts in culinary arts failed to tempt him. Janet knew the very hour of his arrival, and she also knew that it was two hours before he came to seek her. She could not know that his stay with his mother had been as unwilling as it was dutiful; so to complicate matters a little more she had gone out to pay some calls that might have waited a month. But he found her at last on Joscelyn’s porch, her hands in her muff, her curls bobbing from under her hood to the fur-trimmed tippet below, where the winter sunshine seemed to gather itself into a focus. He waved to her from halfway down the square, but she only squinted up her eyes as in a vain effort at recognition.